District of Columbia police testified to council members Monday about never-ending paperwork, difficult commutes and lack of sleep due to the District’s one-of-a-kind policy requiring officers to meet with prosecutors within 24 hours of an arrest.

The policy, which Council Member Tommy Wells has said costs the city $5 million in overtime each year, was the subject of a Council Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary hearing that lasted nearly five hours.

Officer William Dempster spoke about nights when officers would contemplate not making an arrest for fear of losing time off the next day.

“It impacts our statistics, it impacts our officers’ ability to perform,” said retired Lt. Steven Odell, a 32-year veteran of the Metropolitan Police Department.

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“It should never depend on the time of day if we should arrest someone committing a crime in the District of Columbia,” Wells said.

Special Counsel to the U.S. Attorney Patricia Riley said, however, that the meetings with officers are necessary to determine the merits of each case.

“We will not eliminate papering,” she said. Solutions proposed by both officers and prosecutors centered on technology.

The Police Officers Reporting Tool is a computer program that allows officers to prepare paperwork electronically. The program is available to all officers and is considered a big step in reducing the burden on their time, according to Assistant Chief Pete Newsham. But it is only used by a handful of officers.

“We’re attempting to change a culture,” Newsham said when asked why the program was not mandatory.

The longest period of questioning was reserved for Riley and Senior Assistant Attorney General David Rosenthal. Council Members Phil Mendelson and Wells asked for the rationale behind the “court-papering” system and for prosecutors’ intentions for remedying its problems.

“We all believe now that we can vastly reduce the burden of papering on the police officers,” Riley said, citing training programs for better report writing and a technology-based pilot program for the exchange of information between police and prosecutors.